Compulsive Interrupting as Presence-Seizure Wrong Attractor: Thought-Loss Catastrophizing, Contribution-Urgency, and the Paradox of Conversational Disappearance

Compulsive interrupting is formalized as a wrong attractor W_CI within the displacement framework: the chronic pattern of interrupting others in conversation, organized not around simple impulsivity or arrogance but around the terror of thought-loss — the belief that one's emerging thought will disappear or become irrelevant if not immediately expressed. The healthy ground state S0 is calibrated conversational presence — the capacity to hold one's own thoughts while genuinely attending to another's speech; to time contributions to the natural rhythm of conversation; to trust that valuable thoughts can be held briefly without evaporating.

Three mechanisms sustain the interruption basin: thought-loss catastrophizing (the belief that thoughts are fragile and time-limited, converting every conversational moment into a race against thought-evaporation; self-confirming because practicing holding thoughts never develops the capacity to hold them); contribution-urgency equation (the person's sense of having contributed is contingent on having spoken; listening without speaking feels like non-participation and therefore like erasure; interruption is the assertion of presence); and speech-as-thinking (many compulsive interruptions discover the thought through speaking rather than bringing a formed thought to speech; the person cannot think through listening because their thinking requires verbal expression).

The central Presence Paradox states: compulsive interrupting reliably produces the absence it is organized to prevent; the person who interrupts to assert their presence systematically prevents the deep listening that would make their contributions more present and relevant; others begin to manage their disclosures around the interrupter, never going deep because they know they will not be heard.

Nine formal propositions characterize the attractor structure, with developmental roots in environments where getting attention required seizing it. Return paths include thought-holding practice, listening as active participation, IFS work on the urgency-part, and the discovery that held thoughts often emerge more valuable than seized ones.